Anca Dunavete

There are nights when I still burn with passion for all the things we’ve done and for all the things we could still have done. On those nights, I don’t sleep at all. I toss and turn in my bed for hours, fervent and longing and alive. Other nights I sleep well, and I wake up laughing about all the other nights I don’t sleep.

‘What am I losing sleep over?’ I ask myself every morning. ‘There is blood singing in your veins. You can do so much more, you can be anything you want. Move on from the stories you knitted with them, for they belong to none of you now.’

But it takes little more than a few hours spent in this mundane background with a splash of surreal I call my life to want to return to fantasy.

Each memory knocks fiercely on my doors, windows, even cracks in the wall, asking me to play it first. They all contain his face, his voice, his hands. There are so many of them. He happened for long days and hot nights, and it all felt like a little life. My steering wheel still has his fingerprints.

I let go of myself and the world around me to lose myself in the sweet, secret, delicious, ambiguous feelings that he stirred and stirred and stirred, and that now I can’t stop myself from stirring. These memories make the familiar calm come back to me, and I am safe from the emptiness again.

I know I have to let my sadness out through ink and tears to get out of this loop. Let me just see him one more time. Play.